Modes of Subsistence: Foraging to Industry

The dominant set of techniques and social arrangements through which a society gets food and other necessities.

19th-century schemes (e.g., Lewis Henry Morgan's 'savagery' to 'civilization') have been dismantled; the categories are analytic tools for comparison, and real societies mix strategies and are tied into global markets and states.

Living on wild plants, animals, fish, and insects; small flexible bands of ~25–50 that fission and fuse, high mobility, little accumulable property, generalized reciprocity and sharing, relative egalitarianism.

Institutionalized practices that puncture arrogance and keep goods circulating — e.g., Ju/'hoansi teasing a successful hunter about his 'scrawny' antelope.

Sahlins's phrase, based on Richard Lee's time-allocation data showing Kalahari foragers worked ~20 hours a week: affluent because wants were finite and easily satisfied.

Forager egalitarianism isn't universal — storable, dense resources (salmon) supported sedentism, storage, slavery, and ranked houses, i.e., hierarchy.

Small-scale, low-intensity cultivation without plows, irrigation, or draft animals — typically slash-and-burn (swidden) with long fallows; e.g., Yanomami, Tsembaga Maring.

Larger, more sedentary settlements than foraging; land-holding descent groups (lineages, clans); 'big man' leadership based on generous feasting rather than inherited office.

Herding-based subsistence; transhumance = seasonal circuits between fixed pastures (Basseri, Alpine herders); nomadism = more open movement (Somali camel herders, Mongolian households).

Showed how cattle saturate a culture — bridewealth, sacrifice, personal names, poetry, and political alliance all run through the herd.

Farming with plows, irrigation, terracing, fertilizer, draft animals, and permanent fields, producing large storable surpluses that form the material basis of states.